Fast Track to Oblivion
For FRHS?

April 18, 2005

Below are two articles that appeared
in the Rockaway Wave newspaper last week. No matter which side of
the issue you allign yourself with, you do have an opportunity to be heard.
Please write to either or both of the following and let your feelings be
known.

City Councilman James Sanders21-23 Birdsall Ave.Far Rockaway, New York

FRHS On ‘Fast Track’
for ReorganizationHalf Of Staff To Go,
Four Schools To ComeBy Howard Schwach

Far Rockaway High School, which first
opened its doors to Rockaway students in 1897, faces Department of Education
(DOE) reorganization in September that would see the school broken into
four smaller parts and more than half of its present teachers reassigned
to other buildings.

While many public high schools that
have been reorganized over the past several years have been given new names
as well as new programs, it is not clear whether that is going to be the
fate of Far Rockaway High School as well. “Far Rockaway High School
will be redesigned in September because it has been failing for years and
is a School Under Register Review SURR),” a Department of Education Spokesperson
told The Wave this week. “It is not, however, going to be renamed.”

Sources close to the school, however,
say that the plans include renaming the school to more closely represent
the new organization and to “wipe out the poor reputation the school has
had over the past decade.” The high school will reportedly be broken
into four smaller “learning communities,” around a theme that will include
vocational as well as academic programs, according to a source close to
the school, who asked not to be named.

Teachers at the school, many of whom
are at risk of being transferred involuntarily under a reorganization plan,
first heard of the plan on Monday, Aril 4, at a hastily-called after school
meeting.“Phyllis Marino, our Local Instructional
Supervisor, called us together to tell us that the school had officially
been put on the reorganization fast track,” one teacher said. “The rhetoric
was that [Region Five] did not want to do this to us, but that the state
was insisting.” Ray Taruskin, the school’s United Federation of Teachers
Chapter Chairman, says that the teachers were given no plan, nothing in
writing. “We are so frustrated about this,” Taruskin says. “Teachers
are walking around like zombies, trying to find new places to go. They
are applying for school-based option (SBO) transfers, waiting for the transfer
list to come out. They are scared.”

Under Department of Education guidelines,
half of the teachers presently at the school could be reassigned after
an application process is completed. “All of the teachers who want
to stay at the school must apply,” Taruskin says. “Half of them may be
rehired, but there is no surety that anybody will be rehired.” Taruskin
feels that the teachers are being unfairly targeted and believes that it
is not the teacher’s fault that the school is on the SURR list. “There
are a lot of factors that make up a failing school. We had open school
day recently,” he said, “and 141 parents showed up for the evening conferences,
only 10 for the daytime conferences.” “Where is parental accountability
in all of this,” the UFT chair asks.

A source close to the school told The
Wave that the curriculum at the new learning communities would include
health careers and other “vocational subjects.” Taruskin says that
he heard the same.“We are going back to the time where
there were vocational and commercial diplomas as well as Regents or academic
diplomas,” he says. “Back to the shops.” He adds that all of the
shops with the exception of one wood shop were closed over past years.
All of the tools and equipment are gone. At one time, the school had one
of the most successful auto shop programs in the city. Several years ago,
the school’s principal closed the program and all of the tools and equipment
were given away, the school source says.

The reorganization process is expected
to begin this month, with the new four learning communities opening their
doors in September.

‘Fast Track’ To Oblivion
For FRHS?

On April 4, 2005 the teachers at Far
Rockaway High School were working on their staff development day activities
when they were all called together in the school’s auditorium, an unusual
occurrence. There, they were addressed by the school’s Local Instructional
Supervisor (LIS), Phyllis Marino. They were told by Marino that the state
had placed the school on “a reorganization fast track.”

Reorganization has been used in many
New York City High Schools to close the building, reassign half of its
teachers and administrators and then to reopen under a new organization
and a new name. When we asked the Department of Education recently whether
reorganization was in the cards for FRHS, Region Five Superintendent Kathleen
Cashin issued a statement through the DOE’s press office that there were
no plans to reorganize FRHS. More recently, however, Cashin released a
statement to this paper through the DOE press office that said the school
will be reorganized because it has been a School Under Register Review
for three years, but that its name would not be changed. A number of people
close to the school, however, tell us that the name will be changed to
reflect the magnet school that now takes part of the building.

We called the State Department of Education,
and a spokesperson told us that the state does not place schools on the
reorganization list, that the DOE makes that determination. Who is not
telling the truth?

Will FRHS get a new name, wiping out
100+ years of history, or will the four new schools planned for the building
come under the FRHS rubric? We are not sure. What we are sure of, however,
is that it would be a shame for Far Rockaway High School to disappear after
more than 100 years of service to the Rockaway community. We recently learned,
for example, that FRHS is the only high school in the nation (that’s right,
in the nation) to have graduated three Nobel Laureates. How’s that for
history. The three men are Richard Feynman recently deceased, Burton Richter and Baruch S.
Blumberg. The latter two are still alive and still working. Richter, who
won his Nobel for Physics in 1976, is the Director Emeritus of the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center. Blumberg, who won his Nobel in Medicine in 1976
as well, is the Senior Advisor to the President at Fox Chase Cancer Center
in Pennsylvania. In addition, another Nobel Laureate, Dr. Jonas Saulk,
attended FRHS but graduated from another city school.

Add to that such luminaries as Carl
Icahn, Dr. Joyce Brothers and Nancy Lieberman, and you have a history to
be proud of – not one to bury under the name of some alternative program
that will disappear in a few years. If, in fact, FRHS is on the fast track
to oblivion, it is time for the DOE to rethink that change. There are just
too many alumni chomping at the bit to fight the change and just too much
history to ignore.